Debt relief and the end of the world as we know it (and I'll feel fine)

For about a half millennium now—about as old as the modern world, certainly from the beginnings of the New World—Africa and many parts of the non-Western, non-white world have been under attack from powerful, global forces determined to destabilize their civilizations, to siphon off their human and natural resources and to maintain relations that inevitably leave them as economically dependant as possible.

Particularly as it relates to the subjugation of the Afro-Atlantic world, I’m sure there must have been a man or a woman during, for example, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade or during the age of Colonization, standing on the shore, looking out over the night ocean with unspeakable anguish yet with an almost uncontainable sense of expectation, almost bursting from their spirit, declaring-- “This must end…NOW!”

Many of our foreparents in chapters of history that we now only read about, while using whatever means available to them, yet acknowledging their short supply of direct means to change their world, turned their collective spirit in utter dependence on an invisible God--an intuitive conviction saying that by the things seen in the universe, there must be a moral power greater than the circumstances of the world into which they were born. They were certain that, like the invisible God of the Hebrews in Egyptian captivity, God would hear their cry and finally bring an end to world as they knew it.

As we know, 444 years of the Trans-Atlantic/New World chattel slave trade came to an end. Also, nearly 100 years of colonization ended… but many of the lingering, time-released conditions remain with us…and a new era of oppression has replaced them.

Similarly, many of us today, representative of our generation in our chapter of history find our hearts burgeoning with a powerful sense of hope and expectation for the future of our world. For some, they've only seen and heard about while many others have known first-hand some of the real-world conditions--in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia—resulting from this long, half-millennium-long development of what we now call “the Two-Thirds world”. Together, we’ve taken for granted these phenomena all our lives: images of abject poverty, rampant famine, incurable disease, inexhaustible want and ubiquitous death.

For some of us, we take a stand here on the figurative shores of this new millennium, like our foreparents, crying out for God’s sovereign intervention to once and for all break the backs of the systemic and structural forces allied against freedom, justice and life itself. For all of us in support of 100% cancellation of odious and illegitimate debts held against the world’s poorest countries--debt that’s part of an economic relationship with the world’s richest countries that exacerbates poverty, undermines development, stifles education, destroys the environment, misappropriates health care resources and does nothing to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS--we’re part of a global movement that declares, like our foreparents—“This must end--NOW!”

If we can take any hopeful lessons from the past, even as our foreparents saw to it that slavery ended, colonization ended--or even "Jim Crow" segregation in the U.S. or Apartheid in South Africa ended, we can believe that, like what the Bible says, “This too shall pass”—this global debt crisis resulting from one part mismanagement, one part corruption and multiple parts from predatory exploitation by other countries.

It won’t pass without struggle. For some of us, we believe it certainly won’t pass ultimately without the unyielding, sovereign intervention of God at work in the fabric of our earthly actions, as it says in Psalm 103:6, “…work[ing] righteousness and justice for all the oppressed”…or, as Jesus declared in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me…to release the oppressed”

Many of us working for this biblical "jubilee" vision—a vision of global redemption and restoration toward righteousness and justice in economics, trade, governance, the environment, and in all things under the sun--demand that 100% debt cancellation must happen. We believe in its possibility within our collective lifetime. We believe we are literally playing a role to change the actual course of history. We believe that the world we’ve inherited—in this case, a world of gross disparities between what is mostly white, northern haves and Asian/Latin American/African southern have-leasts—is a world we work to bring to an end.

We call not just for 100% cancellation of debts but something far bigger—the manifestation of a cosmic vision resulting in the end of the world of injustice and destructive relationships as we know it.

When this happens, I’ll feel fine, just fine.